how to find out it's a memory leak?

[Christian Kujau <evil@g-house.de>]

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hi list,

during the last weeks i've encounterd some OOM situation here on my little
server machine. that happened with some 2.6.9 and 2.6.10 kernels but i
never found out what the reason was. the machine was running for 2 or 3
weeks and constantly taking up more and more swap until the OOM killer did
his job and killed some task. i decided to reboot then, once i *had* to
reboot because the machine has locked up.
so i suspect a "memory leak" somewhere. knowing nothing about VM and
knowing the term "memory leak" only from hearsay, i just want to know

1) does a memory leak always occur in kernel space? or could some
   userspace application take up more and more swapspace too?
2) where can i look for the process to blame?

i've already thought about it and i really think a userspace app can also
be the bad one here, but "top" and "ps" won't tell me who's to blame.
perhaps somewhere under /proc, but i don't know where. can someone tell me
where to look for?

currently i'm running 2.6.10-rc1-bk19 and 436MB swapspace is already used.
that's not "normal" for this machine and i can from daily "free -m"
outputs that more and more swapspace is used - but i don't know by what!

thanks,
Christian.
- --
BOFH excuse #227:

Fatal error right in front of screen
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